I am a freelance writer with a focus on the Ballard neighborhood. I love connecting what is happening in the community with my own life. I was born to be at large.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..

“Pack A Day/365 Days”

I was standing in the rain last Friday just north of Key Arena waiting for the Metro’s #18 to help me get back to Ballard. The Disney On Ice show had just ended and the sidewalks were choked with children wearing Disney merchandise – I believe they were Woody Woodpecker heads. It was early afternoon but so stormy that all the cars had on their headlights. First Avenue North looked more like New York City than Seattle, yellow cabs and cars all honking, none of them moving when the light turned green.

I stood underneath the bus shelter, stepping out occasionally to look south in hopes that it would hasten the arrival of my bus. I was trying to read the “What’s Happening” section of the Friday PI, but it kept getting blotched with rain when I stepped out. Grandparents to my right were trying to entertain two small children, most of the other people waiting looked resigned. Clearly something had happened downstream because no buses were arriving at all. A reading that I’m coordinating at Ravenna Third Place Books this week was listed under literary events, the irony of my theme, “Oh, for the love of rain!” was not wasted on me. I read about a playwright who is mounting a play a day for 365 days all over Seattle, (“365 Days/365 Plays”) and I thought about the fact that if I rode the bus every day, I could definitely write at least a character sketch a day, although I still wouldn’t be Bus Chick.

Then two people to my left started talking, and I started listening, because it was an unusual pairing. On my left was a young woman, more of a girl really, sixteen or so. She was appropriately dressed for the weather in a North Face jacket with a hood, boots, jeans, careful make-up. She was listening to a man who stood to her left. I would describe him as rough-looking, or weathered, my way of saying that he didn’t look that clean and he was missing many of his front teeth. “How many a day?” he asked.

“About a pack,” she replied, and she had one of those “little” voices, like they confer on dolls that can talk.

“Two things, I wish I’d never learned,” the man said to her, “to smoke cigarettes and to drive a car. Giving up driving wasn’t so bad, but cigarettes, that was tough.”

“Oh yeah?”

I was impressed that she was listening politely, not looking to move away from him.

“I don’t mean to lecture,” he said.

“That’s okay.”

He continued to talk. She continued to listen. I overheard him say that he’d given up drinking. Then a man ducked under the shelter and called out an effusive greeting to my neighbor. “Duke,” he said, “how are you doing?” As though he hadn’t seen him in some weeks. He stretched his right hand out to shake. His other hand went towards the girl and I thought he was going to clasp one of her hands with his left. I wondered how she would feel being included in the friend’s greeting. I watched his hand and realized that he was delivering a pack of Marlboro’s with his left even as he shook with his right.

The girl began to unwrap the clear plastic and tapped out a cigarette. “Is two okay?” she asked in that sweet voice, to the man on her left.

“Two’s fine,” he said.

“Do you want one?” she asked her buyer.

“No, but thanks,” he said.

She struck a cardboard match. “Take care,” the first man said to her, and then he and his friend left the bus shelter and headed north. The girl inhaled and then exhaled. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” a man behind me muttered in response to the smoke. Then the girl stepped out from the shelter and headed south decisively, against the final straggle of the Disney on Ice survivors.

Finally, in one long line all of the delayed buses pulled up to the curb at once, wipers all jerking across broad windshields in a different rhythm. The stage shifted from the wet sidewalk to inside the warm bus. But the girl and the two men had disappeared; they had not been waiting for the same thing after all, and had moved on to enact their same scene at other shelters, on other streets.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..